From Newspaper Science to “NS-Führungswissenschaft”

How the discipline of newspaper studies in Germany adopted to the Nazi Regime

Beitrag von Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz am 13. Mai 2015

Focusing on the years between 1925 and 1960, the present paper shows, first, how the promising takeoff to a modern understanding of communication processes in the field of German newspaper studies was abolished after 1933 and, second, why a renewal had been possible during the 1960s.

A former version of this article has been published in Portuguese Language in Revista Famecos. Mídia, cultura e tecnologia in 2014. I thank Ute Narwartil, Munich, for her profound proof reading of the English text version.

Introduction

More than a decade ago, Arnulf Kutsch and I developed a stage-model of the evolution of German Communication Studies (see Averbeck/Kutsch 2002, reprinted and recapitulated in Meyen/Löblich 2006: 40-41, Averbeck 2008: 4-5). We identified 6 phases:

1. Identification of key research problems and development of curricula for students (1916-1925)

2. Definition and analysis of research topics, student education (1925-1935)

3. Stabilization of the process of institutionalization by active adaption to the Nazi-State (1933-1945)

4. Reconstruction of the discipline after the Nazi-Regime (1945-1960)

5. Redefinition of the discipline as Social Science Research (1960-1980)

6. New theoretical and methodological settings in a changing communication world (1990s till today)

In the following paper, stages two, three and four are under focus.

Phase 1: From the Beginnings to Weimar Republic

The story of Newspaper Science in Germany (Zeitungswissenschaft) has its roots in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, when journalists as well as sociologists and economists started to reflect on the mass press in a modern world. A modern world, observed and analyzed as an urbanized, industrialized, alphabetized, in great amount transnational connected world, structured by the benefits of science. One of the important voices belonged to Max Weber (1864-1920) who up from his famous plan for a Press-Enquete in 1910 (see Kutsch 1988; Pöttker 2001: 313pp.; Meyen/Löblich 2006: 145pp.; Weischenberg 2012: 78pp.) discussed arguments in this direction. He had a new research object in mind: the mass press.

Not least Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) with his famous book upon “The Critique of Public Opinion” [Die Kritik der Öffentlichen Meinung] (1922) inspired a younger student generation of sociologists and newspaper scientists. Tönnies noted waves of upcoming opinions in terms of a “social consciousness” (1922: 573) of female rights, general human rights and the right to free speech, e.g. press freedom as well for European countries as the US. More than a decade later, Tönnies had been torn away from his professorship at the University of Kiel for political reasons by the new NS-administration. During the period of the Weimar Republic it was not least he who influenced his younger pupils to face the difference between two main concepts of public opinion: 1. the unified, consensual and elitist “Public Opinion” of the so called “Republic of Scholars” [Gelehrtenrepublik] (“Die Öffentliche Meinung”, the “Ö” written with a majuscule) and the more pluralistic type of “some”, mostly divergent public opinions (“eine öffentliche Meinung”) struggling about leadership in public opinion (Tönnies 1922: 131-190).

A young milieu of sociologically educated direct pupils of Tönnies as well as a citation circle around him grasped at these ideas and asked, if modern mass press is a factor in the processes of opinion building. Gerhard Münzner, Walter Auerbach, Emil Willems, Wilhelm Carlé and Ernest Manheim sketched communication processes as bi- or multidirectional. Doing so they went far beyond an at that time typical thinking in stimulus-response-categories. They outlined dynamic scenarios: Readers who built up their “gaseous” and “fluid” daily opinions (terms they took from Tönnies book) not primarily by the daily press but by their longtime primary socialization (see Münzner 1928); readers who were embedded in group behavior and attitudes (see Auerbach 1930), as well as in mechanisms of group control (see Willems 1930); newspapers which were geared to the opinions of segmented publics (see Carlé 1931); readers who – especially in the upraising bourgeois public sphere of the 18th century – acted as communicators themselves (see Manheim 1933). Obviously, Ernst Manheim (1900-2002) was the most brilliant of those young thinkers (see the reviews of his book on public opinion by the professor for Newspaper Science, Wilhelm Kapp and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in 1934). Manheim sketched all communication processes as multiplex between a communicator (with intentions), an addressee (with expectations) and a content (adapted to those intentions and expectations) in a certain mediated time/space-setting from in-group to out-group communication, from interpersonal communication to mass press (Manheim 1933: 17, in detail Averbeck 1999: 430-431).

This “process oriented thinking” (Averbeck 1999: 215pp.) of the Weimar generation of PhD-students and university assistants inspired by sociologists like Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and not at least Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), who himself hosted a class on Press Science at the University of Heidelberg in the early 1930s (see Averbeck 1999: 226pp.) was new and challenging. But what caused this massive turn to the discipline of sociology by newspaper scientists? It happened partly for analytical reasons, but also due to a structural deficit: Newspaper Studies lacked the privilege to award doctoral degrees (which were the only possible degrees at that time in Germany); the University of Leipzig was the only one who had that privilege, since 1926. Therefore, Professors of Newspaper Science like Emil Dovifat (1890-1969) in Berlin or Karl d’Ester (1881-1960) at Munich University (1) had to face the situation, that they supervised dissertations which had to undergo a final evaluation by professors of sociology (like Alfred Vierkandt at Berlin in the case of the PhD of Emil Willems) or economy (like Salomon Paul Altmann and Emil Lederer (2) in Heidelberg, see Averbeck 1999: 476pp., 516). From today’s view, this lack of the privilege to award doctoral degrees has been not solely a disadvantage because it fostered interdisciplinarity. We may even speak of a growing interdisciplinary milieu between newspaper studies and sociology in the early 1930s (see Averbeck 1999).

Phase 2: From Weimar Republic to the Nazi-State

The promising takeoff to a modern understanding of communication processes in the field of newspaper studies was abolished after 1933 (in detail Averbeck 1999: 174pp.; Averbeck 2001, 2008). Several overlapping reasons are to mention:

ongoing and even forced institutionalization of Newspaper Science, partly financed directly by the Propaganda Ministry during the Third Reich, going along with a loss of theoretical and methodological concepts (see Averbeck 1999: 102pp., Averbeck/Kutsch 2002; Kutsch 2010)

The ideological absorption of the corpus of ideas: Abolition of inspiring concepts like “Public Opinion” (which was reduced to “Volksgemeinschaft”, a typical concept of fascist thinking, see for ex. Kurth/Hollmann 1940: 16); the anti-sociological verdict by the Association of Newspaper Scientists DZV (dissertations with sociological focus were no longer welcome and in some cases they had been declared as “private opinions” of their authors, denying them the right for publication of the dissertation, see the case of the student Heinrich Arimond at Munich, Averbeck 1999: 134pp., 460pp.)

Propaganda as a legitimate form of communication (see Six 1936; Kurth/Hollmann 1942)

Anti-Semitism, racial hatred and denunciation (there were professors who denounced their students for so called ‘race crimes’ (see Averbeck 1999: 111), or professors like Hans Amandus Münster at Leipzig who forced their students to participate in anti-Jewish ‘research’ concerning the Jewish Press (see Ehrich 1992: 92; Jedraszczyk 2011: 199).

Professors openly sympathizing with and/or sustaining actively the “Third Reich”: Consequently, young men made big careers as professors − even if their PhD-works were extremely weak. For example Karl Kurth (1910-81), later director of the institute of Newspaper Studies at the University of Vienna, which was founded during the German occupation of Austria (see Kutsch 1984, Kniefacz 2008: 165pp.).

Flight and emigration of the generation of interdisciplinary oriented PhD-students and/or university assistants: Gerhard Münzner to Israel, Emil Willems after more than a decade in Brazil to the US, Walter Auerbach to Great Britain, Ernst Manheim via Hungary and after having spent some years in Great Britain to the US (see Kutsch 1988, Averbeck 1999: 103pp; Averbeck 2001).

Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung (source: Manheim 1979)

Gerhard Münzner (1904-1958), later Gershon Meron, left science, worked for the “General Federation of Jewish Labor” in Palestine and headed an Israeli Energy Company (see Münzner 1943; Averbeck 1999: 239pp.). Walter Auerbach (1905-1975) emigrated to Great Britain, became a part of the Resistance against the Nazis and had a career in the German Labor Ministry in the late 1960s (see Averbeck 1999: 308pp.) (3). Emilio Willems alias Emil Willems (1905-1997) fled to Brazil; later he teached as a professor at the University of Vanderbilt, Tennessee (4). Ern(e)st Manheim (1900-2002), the younger Cousin of Karl Mannheim, joined the London School of Economics in 1935, the Department for Sociology at Chicago University in 1937 and established the Sociology Department in Kansas City, Missouri, up from 1938 (5).

Der Gegnerforscher (source: Hachmeister 1998)

NS-Newspaper Science without any doubt and like many other disciplinary branches in German academia had been actively and intensively intermingled with the “Third Reich” (see Kutsch 1987, 2010). This is true for research as well as for education and journalism training (see Averbeck 1999: 142pp.). Zeitungswissenschaft has not at least been a ‘career center’ for journalists and high-ranking NS-politicians like Franz Alfred Six (1909-1975), an official of the Secret Service of the SS [Sicherheitsdienst der SS] and starting in 1937 as a professor for Newspaper Science in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) (see Hachmeister 2004) (6).

Walther Heide (1884-?) was the one who linked Newspaper Science to the NS-administration up to the Propaganda Ministry. In the Weimar Republic he was a press agent in the Foreign Office, later deputy speaker of the Hitler-Hugenberg-Papen-Government; and after 1933 head of the “Auslands-Presse-Büro”, a part of the NS-Foreign Propaganda. In 1934, Heide was awarded an honorary professorship at the Technical University of Berlin and became the powerful leader of the Union of Newspaper Scientists “Deutscher Zeitungswissenschaftlicher Verband” (DZV) (see Bohrmann/Kutsch 1981; Kutsch 2010).

Heide organized Newspaper Science, following the so called “leader principle” [Führerprinzip]: He reached to build up conformist student organizations and to get funds for the infrastructure of the institutes for Newspaper Science if necessary from the Propaganda Ministry itself. This was the case especially in Munich, where his close friend Karl d’Ester in 1934 – due to his recommendation – had been installed as an Associated Professor for Press Science (see Kutsch 2011: 132p.). The Munich Institute later was called a “Doktorfabrik” – a manufactory to ‘produce’ PhD’s (see Meyen 2004, Meyen/Löblich 2006: 66).

Heide was not the type of an obsessed fanatic of the NS-state, but a very overambitious and effective functionary: He established a rewarding system of posts, grants and honors to pilot the community of newspaper researchers. Together with the leading press politician of the Nazi-Regime, Otto Dietrich (1887-1953), and once more with financial support of the Propaganda Ministry, he even succeeded in installing institutes for Newspaper Science in Vienna, Prague and Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) during the German Occupation (for the history of all three institutes an overview in Kniefacz 2008: 54pp.). Heide’s final fate is unclear, there is a narrative that he died in Russian captivity in 1957, but this is not verified.

The Spiral of Silence in Science

It is shameful, but it took a long time until German Communication Studies started to look into their own past. Only members of the second generation of researchers in German Communication Studies, so to speak the ‘grandchildren generation’ of the professors of the “Third Reich”, especially Hans Bohrmann (born 1940) and Arnulf Kutsch (born 1949) recovered great amounts of this forgotten history (see Bohrmann/Kutsch 1981; Kutsch 1985, 1987, 2011; Bohrmann 2004). For Austria this work of unmasking the history of Nazi Newspaper Science during the occupation has been done by Wolfgang Duchkowitsch (born in 1942) and Fritz Hausjell (born 1959).

There had been a break and a rejection of the past (‘Whitewashing by Not-Knowing’) after 1945 (see Langenbucher 2004; Kutsch 2006; Koenen 2008).’Denazified’ by the Allied Administration, the elder d’Ester in Munich as well as Dovifat in Berlin, returned to their positions. Dovifat (re-)founded the Institute for Newspaper Science at the new Free University of Berlin. After my own research in several archives, I am able to say: Even if Dovifat had been a problematic figure, continuing his professorship during Nazi times, it is very obvious that he was not anti-semitic. He even had lied to help his academic assistant Hans Traub (1901-1943), who had Jewish great-grandparents (in detail Averbeck 1999: 361pp.).

Die Spirale des Schweigens (source: Duchkowitsch et al. 2004)

After World War II, most of the institutes for Newspaper Science had been closed completely, mostly because of the Nazi-Ideology of their directors (7). From formerly 17 Institutes only 3 (Munich, Münster in Westphalia, Free University of Berlin – the former institute had been at the old Friedrich-Wilhelm University) survived the year 1946 in Western Germany (see Stöber 2004b: 123). Leipzig, the fourth, had a different history: The Nazis discharged the liberal Erich Everth (1878-1934) as the second director of the institute after the famous economist Karl Bücher (1847-1930) (who founded the Institute in 1918). The NS-administration installed the ideologically conform Hans Amandus Münster (1901-1963) as head of the Leipzig Institute. After World War II, the Institute became the center of journalism education in Eastern Germany. Its first director was Hermann Budzislawski (1901-1978), known as one of the editors of the prominent journal Die Weltbühne who had emigrated to the US during Nazi-Times (for the history of the Institute at Leipzig during the Weimar Republic, the Nazi-state and the socialist German Democratic Republic, GDR, till 1989 see the overview by Kutsch 2009).

Phase 3: Renewal without Remembering

After 1945, the Western German Newspaper Science seemed to be at a dead end, considering its highly ideological, partly clearly criminal past. There had been a direct link between the academic education by teaching and the integration of students to the administration of the NS-State, especially at the institutes at Leipzig by its leader Hans Amandus Münster and the Institute of Königsberg under the guidance of Franz Alfred Six. Both mentored and helped students into political careers, not at least into the Secret Service of the SS (Hachmeister 2004: 69). After 1945, there had been public discussions between German politicians as well as journalists to shut down not only some institutes, but the whole discipline (see Meyen/Löblich 2006: 67). Meanwhile after World War II, Franz Alfred Six as well as Hans Amandus Münster found new spheres of activity in the upraising fields of market research and advertising. Six worked for the Porsche Holding (see Wagner 2013; Hachmeister 2002: 27; 2004: 71, also Urban/Herpolsheimer 1984) (8). He had been convicted to 20 years of jail for war crimes during the Nuremberg Trials, but was amnestied in 1952 by the Allied High Commission in the Federal Republic of Germany (see Hachmeister 2002: 24, 2004: 79).

After a time of stagnation with only three institutes (München, Münster, Berlin) in Western Germany and the not very fruitful continuity of the professorships of Dovifat in Berlin and d’Ester in Munich (see Stöber 2004: 143; Koenen 2008), the renewal had been possible during the 1960s for those reasons:

De-Nazification by the Allied Forces and repression of NS-ideology (but mostly without critical reflection of the Nazi-Past by the community of researchers) (see Hardt 2004)

Institutionalization of “Publizistikwissenschaft” and widening the focus beyond newspaper studies to broadcasting and all kinds of public communication, starting over with trustworthy new professors, mostly outsiders coming from journalistic practice and/or other disciplines as well as other countries (see Meyen/Löblich 2006: 67; Löblich 2010).

Walter Hagemann (source: private archive Horst Hagemann)

At the University of Münster, the former Catholic journalist Walter Hagemann (1900-1964) who held a doctoral degree in history from the University of Berlin began as a Professor for “Publizistikwissenschaft”, in 1946. He was one of the first German academics to scrutinize the NS-propaganda system (see Hagemann 1948). As a member of the CDU, the party of Konrad Adenauer, he actively opposed Adenauer’s politics of Western integration, and he was a leadership figure of the anti-nuclear movement in Western Germany. In 1959, he lost his professorship due to political reasons as well as for being accused of sexual relationships with female students. After that he relocated in the GDR, where he died a few years later (see Wiedemann 2012).

Henk Prakke,1960 (source: private archive Joachim Westerbarkey)

The Dutch sociologist and publisher Henk Prakke (1900-1992), a refugee from the Nazis in the town of Amsterdam in the early 1940s, jailed by the Gestapo in 1945, became one of the fresh faces of the new “Publizistikwissenschaft”. The University of Münster in Westphalia appointed him to a professorship, in 1960. He developed a rich theoretical model, based on an anthropological understanding of human communication, which took a much wider perspective than those of Emil Dovifat, Karl d’Ester and also his predecessor Walter Hagemann. During the student revolt in the late sixties, Prakke again fled Germany: Some students had barricaded his office, their goal being to belittle professorial authority. In Prakke’s personal view, this was a clear insult and aggression, only some twenty years after World War II; his reaction was to leave the institute (for Prakke see in detail Kutsch/Hemels/Schmolke 2000; Klein 2005; Meyen/Löblich 2006: 239pp.)

Starting in 1964, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1916-2010) was establishing a new institute at the University of Mainz. She offered years of experience in opinion research at her Allensbach Institute for market research which she had founded in 1947. Between 1933 and 1945 she had been a student of Emil Dovifat in Berlin, she gained a fellowship of the German Exchange Service (DAAD) for the University of Missouri, and worked in Germany as a journalist for Das Reich, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung. Noelle-Neumann has been largely criticized for opportunism and anti-semitism concerning her journalistic work during Nazi-times (see Wendelin 2013; Becker 2013). Based on her huge research on polls and voting, she developed the famous analytical concept of the spiral of silence, meaning the public pressure on individual opinion building processes under the strong influence of television (see Schenk 2007: 526-577).

On the one hand, her model has been very fruitful for further empirical research worldwide, on the other hand it evoked controversy: Her typing of men as weak and passive when facing public opinion and public pressure has been compared to followers [Mitläufer] in the sense of Adornos and Horkheimers “Authoritarian Personality”. Deliberation and rationality of discourse are not in the focus of her model of public opinion. The clash between the American Scholar Christopher Simpson and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann herself concerning her past produced a lot of public interest in US-American and German mainstream media, namely Der Spiegel and The New York Times (9). Not very well known – perhaps because it is not in line with the very critical public view on Noelle – is the anecdote, that during the 1950s she had close working relations as well on a market research project as on her habilitation project with Theodor W. Adorno (see Grube 2013). Lifelong, she denied all allegations to have or to have had a national socialist or fascist orientation (see Meyen/Löblich 2006: 265; Wendelin 2013). Noelle remains an ambiguous figure. Further research on her scientific and journalistic biography as well as her role in market research and as a political consultant of Chancellor Helmut Kohl (see Meyen/Löblich 2006: 262) is needed. Whether or not Nazi-ideology had played a part in her life and work: She definitively took part in the elite-continuity between the early 1940s and the young German Federal Republic (see Becker 2013; Fuchs 2013; Grube 2013).

Two famous men had been institutional outsiders but at the same time insiders of the field: Gerhard Maletzke (1922-2010) and Otto Groth (1875-1965). Groth is very well known for his definition of the press as an organ of actuality, universality, periodicity and publicity (which he formulated as early as 1928). As a Jew he was banned from Munich University in 1934 and no longer allowed to teach. Later, his voluminous work on “Press as a cultural power” [Die unerkannte Kulturmacht] has been very influential on the concept of mediation [vermittelte Mitteilung, see Langenbucher 1998; Brosda 2008: 145-166; Hepp 2012: 32].

Gerhard Maletzke (photo: Dorothee Stommel)

Maletzke created a model of communication which has been recapitulated by German students for decades, the so called field-scheme of Mass Communications [Feldschema der Massenkommunikation] which combines communicator and usage oriented research in one model. Like Prakke and Noelle he acted as a translator of US-American Communication Research to the German Community. As early as in 1962 he began to work in the field of intercultural communication – a topic largely neglected by the German community of communication scholars who were fixated on national subjects at that time (see Averbeck-Lietz/Klein 2009). He never gained a professorship in Germany; starting 1972, he established the Asian Mass Communication and Information Centre in Singapore (see Meyen/Löblich 2006: 229).

Outlook

In reconstructing the history of communication studies, we find institutional approaches, biographic approaches, milieu and generational approaches (for overviews over the types of research in the history of Communication Studies see Meyen/Löblich 2006: 15pp.;Löblich/Scheu 2011; Meyen 2013). Nevertheless, there is a clear deficit: all that research on academic careers (including those in interwar times) mostly focusses on successful careers, the best example is the emigration history of Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901-1976) (see Langenbucher 1988). Research at the margins of the field of Communication Studies, let alone a view at female students and researchers is very difficult (see Rowland/Simonson 2014) and still weak. This is true also for the emigrants of German Newspaper Studies who fled the country during the Nazi State like the above mentioned Gerhard Münzner, Emil Willems or Ernst Manheim (see Averbeck 2001).

Currently, the field of vision is widening and the German community tries to get more into inter- and transnational perspectives of the history of the field (see Schäfer 2012, Averbeck-Lietz 2011, 2012, Löblich/Scheu 2011). This is embedded in an increasing and promising international trend (see Blumler/McLeod/Rosengren 1992; Mattelart/Mattelart 2002; Katz/Durham Peters et al. 2003; Scannell 2007; Thussu 2009). Knowledge of the development of communication studies worldwide is not only relevant for historical reasons but also for us to understand how different research cultures face similar global trends beyond public media in the digitalized era. Awareness of the past and the theoretical and methodological backgrounds of the different research communities is essential for a mutual understanding in the present (see the forthcoming book on “Communication under international comparison” with contributions from Nothern, Western, Eastern and Southern Europe, Latin America, US, Japan and Egypt (Averbeck-Lietz 2015).

Footnotes

2 The professor for economics Emil Lederer (1882-1993) emigrated in 1933. He was one of the founders of the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research in New York. The sociologist and anthropologist Alfred Vierkandt (1867-1953) was not any longer allowed to teach after 1934; he returned to the University of Berlin in 1946.

3 The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung held his personal and professional documents. During World War II, Auerbach was a consultant of the BBC and co-founded under the false name of ”Walter Dirksen” a pirate radio (Sender der Europäischen Revolution). He had famous colleagues in that pirate radio: Fritz Eberhard, Marie Jahoda, Richard Löwenthal (see Averbeck 1999: 309).

4 Professional documents (unpublished texts etc.) not yet revised in the context of the history of science are stored by the Vanderbilt University.

6 In the Secret Service of the SS, the so called “Security Service” [Sicherheitsdienst] Six was the chief of Adolf Eichmann for two years, see Hachmeister 2004: 70. Six himself had been mentored by Richard Heydrich, founder of the Secret Service “SD” (see Urban/Herpolsheimer 1984: 183).

7 Bohrmann (2009) describes the decline of the institutes after 1945 in detail and for nearly all institutes in Germany.

8 For the elite continuity of the inner circle of the Security Service of the SS in the new economic sector of communications as well as into the new (leftist) news magazine Der Spiegel and the daily conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in detail Hachmeister 1998.

Stefanie Averbeck: The Post-1933 Emigration of Communication Researchers from Germany. The Lost Works of the Weimar Generation. In: European Journal of Communication, Vol. 16 (2001), No. 4, pp. 451-475.

Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz: French and Latin American Perspectives on Mediation and Mediatization: A lecture note from Germany. In: Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, Vol. 3 (2011), No. 2, pp. 177-195.